Archive for August 2014

Cycle of nature of work, capabilities of tools, architecture of platform.

Are tablets the next big thing, a saturated market (already), dead (!), or just in a lull? The debate continues while the sales of tablets continue to outpace laptops and will soon overtake all PCs (of all form factors and OS). What is really going on is an architectural transformation—the architecture that defined the PC is being eclipsed by the mobile OS architecture.

The controversy of this dynamic rests with the disruptive nature—the things that were easy to do with a PC architecture that are hard or impossible to do with a mobile OS, as well as the things in a mobile OS that make traditional PCs seem much easier. Legacy app compatibility, software required for whole professions, input preferences, peripherals, and more are all part of this. All of these are also rapidly changing as software evolves, scenarios adapt, and with that what is really important changes.

Previous posts have discussed the changing nature of work and the new capabilities of tools. This post details the architecture of the platform. Together these three form an innovation cycle—each feeding into and from each other, driving the overall change in the computing landscape we see today.

The fundamental shift in the OS is really key to all of this. For all the discussed negatives the mobile OS architecture brings to the near term, it is also an essential and inescapable transition. Often during these transitions we focus in the near term on the visible differences and miss the underlying nature of the change.

During the transition from mini to PC, the low price and low performance created a price/performance gap that the minis thought they would exploit. Yet the scale volume, architectural openness, and rapid improvement in multi-vendor tools (and more) contributed to a rapid acceleration that could not compare.

During the transition from character-based to GUI-based PCs many focused on the expense of extra peripherals such as graphics cards and mice, requirement for more memory and MIPs, not to mention the performance implications of the new interface in terms of training and productivity. Yet, Moore’s law, far more robust peripheral support (printers and drivers), and ability to draw on multi-app scenarios (clipboard and more) transformed computing in ways character-based could not.

The same could be said about the transition to internetworking with browsers. The point is that the ancillary benefits of these architectural transitions are often overlooked while the dialog primarily focuses on the immediate and visible changes in the platform and experience. Sometimes the changes are mitigated over time (i.e. adding keyboard shortcuts to GUI or the evolution of the PC to long file names and real multi-tasking and virtual memory). Other times the changes become the new paradigm as new customers and new scenarios dominate (i.e. mouse, color, networking).

The transition to the mobile OS platforms is following this same pattern. For all the debates about touch versus keyboard, screen-size, vertical integration, or full-screen apps, there are fundamental shifts in the underlying implementation of the operating system that are here to stay and have transformed computing.

We are fortunate during this transition because we first experienced this with phones that we all love and use (more than any other device) so the changes are less of a disconnect with existing behavior, but that doesn’t reduce the challenge for some or even the debate.

Mobile OS paradigm

The mobile OS as defined by Android, iOS, Windows RT, Chrome OS, Windows Phone, and others is a very different architecture from the PC as envisioned by Windows 7/8, Mac OS X, Linux desktop. The paradigm includes a number of key innovations that when taken together define the new paradigm.

ARM. ARM architecture for mobile provides a different view of the “processor”: SoC, multi-vendor, simpler, lower power consumption, fanless, rich graphics, connectivity, sensors, and more. All of these are packaged in a much lower cost way. I am decidedly not singling out Intel/AMD about this change, but the product is fundamentally different than even Intel’s SoCs and business approach. ARM is also incompatible with x86 instructions which means, even virtualized, the existing base of software does not run, which turns out to be an asset during this change (the way OS/360 and VMS didn’t run on PCs).

Security. At the heart of mobile is a more secure platform. It is not more secure because there are few pointers in the implementation or fewer APIs, but more secure because apps run with a different notion of what they can/cannot do and there is simply no way to get apps on the device that can violate those rules (other than for developers of course). There’s a full kernel there but you cannot just write your own kernel mode drivers to do whatever you want. Security is a race of course and so more socially engineered, password stealing, packet sniffing, phone home evil apps will no doubt make their way to mobile but you won’t see drive by buffer overrun attacks take over your device, keystroke loggers, or apps that steal other apps’ data.

Quality over time and telemetry. We are all familiar with the way PCs (and to a lesser but non-zero degree Macs) decay over time or get into states where only a reformat or re-imaging will do. Fragility of the PC architecture in this regard is directly correlated with the openness and so very hard to defend against, even among the most diligent enthusiasts (myself included). The mobile OS is designed from the ground up with a level of isolation between the OS and apps and between apps that all but guarantee the device will continue to run and perform the way it did on the first day. When performance does take a turn for the worse, there’s ongoing telemetry that can easily point to the errant/causal app and removing it returns things to that baseline level of excellence.

App store model. The app store model provides for both a full catalog of apps easily searched and a known/reviewed source of apps that adhere to some (vendor-specified) level of standards. While vendors are taking different approaches to the level of consistency and enforcement, it is fair to say this approach offers so many advantages. Even in the event of a failure of the review/approval process, apps can be revoked if they prove to be malicious in intent or fixed if there was an engineering mistake. In addition, the centralized reviews provide a level of app telemetry that has previously not existed. For developers and consumers, the uniform terms and licensing of apps and business models are significant improvements (though they come with changes in how things operate).

All day battery life. All day battery life has been a goal of devices since the first portable/battery PCs. The power draw of x86 chipsets (including controllers and memory), the reliability challenges of standby power cycles, and more have made this incredibly difficult to reliably “add on” to the open PC architecture. Because of the need for device drivers, security software, and more the likelihood that a single install or peripheral will dramatically change the power profile of a traditional device is commonplace. The “closed” nature of a mobile OS along with the process/app model make it possible to have all day battery life regardless of what is thrown at it.

Always connected. A modern mobile OS is designed to be always connected to a variety of networks, most importantly the WWAN. This is a capability from the chipset through the OS. This connectivity is not just an alternative for networking, but built into the assumptions of the networking stack, the process model, the app model, and the user model. It is ironic that the PC architecture which had optional connectivity is still less good at dealing with intermittent connectivity than mobile which has always been less consistent than LAN or wifi. The need to handle the constant change in connectivity drove a different architecture. In addition, the ability to run with essentially no power draw and screen off while “waking up” instantly for inbound traffic is a core capability.

Always up to date apps/OS. Today’s PC OSes all have updaters and connectivity to repositories from their vendors, but from the start the modern mobile OS is designed to be constantly updated at both the app and OS from one central location (even if the two updates are handled differently). We are in a little bit of an intermediate state because on PCs there are some apps (like Chrome and Firefox, and security patches on Windows) that update without prompts by default yet on mobile we still see some notifications for action. I suspect in short order we will see uniform and seamless, but transparent, updates.

Cloud-centric/stateless. For decades people have had all sorts of tricks to try to maintain a stateless PC: the “M” drive, data drives or partitions, roaming profiles, boot from server, VM or VDI, even routine re-imaging, etc. None of these worked reliably and all had the same core problem, which was that whatever could go wrong if you weren’t running them could still go wrong and then you’re one good copy was broken everywhere. The mobile OS is designed from the start to have state and data in the cloud and given the isolation, separation, and kernel architecture you can reliably restore your device often in minutes.

Touch. Touch is the clearly the most visible and most challenging transition. Designing the core of the OS and app model for touch first but with support for keyboards has fundamentally altered the nature of how we expect to interact with devices. No one can dispute that for existing workloads on existing software that mouse and keyboard are superior and will remain so (just as we saw in the transition from mainframe to mini, CUI to GUI, client/server to web, etc.) However, as the base of software and users grows, the reality is that things will change—work will change, apps will change, and thus work products will change, such that touch-first will continue to rise. My vote is that the modern “laptop” for business will continue to be large screen tablets with keyboards (just as the original iPad indicated). The above value propositions matter even more to todays mobile information worker as evidenced by the typical airport waiting area or hotel lobby lounge. I remain certain that innovation will continue to fill in the holes that currently exist in the mobile OS and tablets when it comes to keyboards. Software will continue to evolve and change the nature of precision pointing making it only something you need for PC only scenarios.

Enterprise management. Even in the most tightly managed environment, the business PC demonstrates the challenges of the architecture. Enterprise control on a mobile OS is designed to be a state management system, not a compute based approach. When you use a managed mobile device, enterprise management is about controlling access to the device and some set of capabilities (policies), but not about running arbitrary code and consuming arbitrary system resources. The notion that you might type your PIN or password to your mobile device and initiate a full scan of your storage and install an arbitrary amount of software before you can answer a call is not something we will see on a modern mobile OS. So many of the previous items in the list have been seen as challenges by enterprise IT and somewhat ironically the tools developed to diagnose and mitigate them have only deepened the challenges for the PC. With mobile storage deeply encrypted, VPN access to enterprise resources, and cloud data that never lands on your device there are new ways to think of “device management”.

Each of these are fundamental to the shift to the mobile OS. Many other platform features are also significantly improved such as accessibility, global language support, even the clipboard and printing.

What is important about these is how much of a break from the traditional PC model they are. It isn’t any one of these as much as the sum total that one must look at in terms of the transition.

Once one internalizes all these moving parts, it becomes clear why the emphasis on the newly architected OS and the break from past software and hardware is essential to deliver the benefits. These benefits are now what has come to be expected from a computing device.

While a person new to computing this year might totally understand a large screen device with a keyboard for some tasks, it is not likely that it would make much sense to have to reboot, re-image, or edit the registry to remove malware, or why a device goes from x hours of battery life to 1/2 x hours just because some new app was installed. At some point the base expectations of a device change.

The mobile OS platforms we see today represent a new paradigm. This new paradigm is why you can have a super computer in your pocket or access to millions of apps that together “just work”.

Spending time in Africa, one is always awestruck. The continent has so much to offer, from sands to rain forests, from apes to zebras, from Afrikaans to Zulu. More than 1.1 billion people, 53 countries and at least 2,000 different spoken languages make for amazing diversity and energy.

Yet even while spending just a little time, you quickly see the economic challenges faced by many — slums, townships, settlements and the poverty they represent are seen too frequently. The contrast with the developing world is immense. As a visitor, you’re not particularly surprised to find the difficulties in staying connected to wireless services that you’ve become reliant upon.

We hear about the mobile revolution in Africa all the time. Today, this is a revolution in voice and text on feature phones and increasingly on smartphones, phablets and small tablets. Smartphones are making a rapid rise in use, if for no other reason than they have become inexpensive and ubiquitous on the world stage, and also thanks, in part, to reselling of used phones from developed markets.

But keeping smartphones connected to the Internet is straining the spectrum in most countries, and is certainly straining the connectivity infrastructure. Africa, for the most part, will “skip over” PCs, as hundreds of millions of people connect to the Internet exclusively by phones and tablets. But there’s an acute need for improved connectivity.

The problem is that, even in the most developed areas of Africa, the deployment of strong and fast 3G and 4G coverage is lagging, and the capital that is available will flow to build out areas where there are paying customers. That means that the outlying areas, where a lot of people live, will continue to be underserved for quite some time.

Alan Knott-Craig, an experienced South African entrepreneur who is setting out to bring connectivity via Wi-Fi across his homeland, knows that Internet access is transformative to those in slums and townships. His previous company, Mxit, where he was CEO, developed a wildly popular social network for feature phones. It delivered a vast array of services, from education to community to commerce, and is in use by tens of millions.

Given the challenges of connectivity in Africa, you often find yourself searching for a Wi-Fi connection for any substantial browsing or app usage. The best case — except for a couple of markets and capital cities — is that you will get a strong 3G and occasional 4G that is highly dependent on carrier and location. It is not uncommon for folks to have smartphones that are used for voice and text when on the network, and apps that are used only when there is Wi-Fi. It’s not just a way to save money or avoid your data cap — Wi-Fi is a necessity.

“Going where the money isn’t”

One can imagine there’s a big business to be had building out the Wi-Fi hotspot infrastructure in the country. Knott-Craig recognized this as he began to explore how to bring connectivity to more people.

Having grown up in South Africa and deeply committed to both the social and business needs of the country, Knott-Craig has also dedicated his businesses to those who are least well served and would benefit the most. Over the past 20 years, the improvements in service delivery to the slums and townships of South Africa have improved immensely, reducing what once seemed like an insurmountable gap. While there is clearly a long way to go, progress is being made.

The transformation that mobile is bringing to townships is almost beyond words to those who are deeply familiar with the challenges. Talking and texting with family and friends are great and valuable. A mobile phone brings empowerment and identity (a phone number is the most reliable form of identity for many) in ways that no other service has been able to. Access to information, education and community all come from mobile phones. Mobile is a massive accelerator when it comes to closing economic divides.

All too often in business, the path is to build a business around where the money is. Knott-Craig’s deep experience in mobile communications told him that the major carriers will address connectivity in the cities and where there is already money. So, in his words, he set out to improve mobile connectivity by “going where the money isn’t.”

It was obvious to Alan that setting up Wi-Fi access would be transformative. The question was really how to go about it.

Building bridges

Time and again, one lesson from philanthropy is that the solutions that work and endure are the ones that enroll the local community. Services that are created by partnerships between the residents of townships, the government and business are the only way to build sustainable programs. The implication is that rolling into town with a bunch of access points and Internet access sounds like a good idea — who wouldn’t want connectivity? — but in practice would be met with resistance from all sides.

Thinking about the parties involved, Knott-Craig created Project Isizwe — helping to deliver Wi-Fi to townships on behalf of municipalities. “Isizwe” is Xhosa for “nation,” “tribe” or “people.”

In the townships, people pay for Internet access by the minute, by the text and by the megabyte. Rolling out Wi-Fi needed to fit within this model, and not create yet another service to buy. So the first hurdle to address would be to find a way to piggyback on that existing payment infrastructure.

To do this, Knott-Craig worked with carriers in a very smart way. Carriers want their customers on the Internet, and in fact would love to offload customers to Wi-Fi when available. While they can do this in densely populated urban areas where access points can be set up, townships pose a very different environmental challenge, discussed below.

Given the carriers’ openness to offloading customers to Wi-Fi, the project devised a solution based on the latest IEEE standards for automatically signing on to available hotspots (something that we wish we would experience in practice in the U.S.). A customer of one of the major carriers, MTN for example, would initiate a connection to the Isizwe network, and from then on would automatically authenticate and connect using the mobile number and prepaid megabytes, just as though the Wi-Fi were a WWAN connection.

This “Hotspot 2.0″ implementation is amazingly friendly and easy to use. It removes the huge barrier to using Wi-Fi that most experience (the dreaded sign-on page), and that in turn makes the carriers very happy. Because of the value to the carriers, Knott-Craig is working to establish this same billing relationship across carriers, so this works no matter who provides your service.

Of course this doesn’t solve the problem of where the bandwidth comes from in the first place. Since Knott-Craig is all about building bridges and enrolling support across the community, he created unique opportunities for those that already have unused bandwidth to be part of the solution.

Whether it is large corporations or the carriers themselves, Project Isizwe created a wholesale pool of bandwidth by either purchasing outright or using donated bandwidth to create capacity. The donated bandwidth provides a tax deduction benefit at the same time. Everyone wins. Interestingly, the donated bandwidth makes use of off-peak capacity, which is exactly when people in the townships want to spend time on the Internet anyway.

Government

With demand and supply established, the next step is to enroll the government. Here again, the team’s experience in working with local officials comes into play.

As with any market around the world, you can’t just put up public-use infrastructure on public land and start to use it. The same thing is true in the townships of South Africa. In fact, one could imagine an outright rejection of providing this sort of service from a private organization, simply because it competes with the service delivery the government provides.

In addition, the cost factor is always an issue. Too many programs for townships start out free, but end up costing the government money (money they don’t have) over time. It isn’t enough to provide the capital equipment and ask the government to provide operational costs, or vice versa. Project Isizwe is set up to ensure that public free Wi-Fi networks are a sustainable model, but needed government support to do so.

With the enrollment of the carriers and community support, bringing along the government required catering to their needs, as well. One of the biggest challenges in the townships is the rough-and-tumble politics — not unlike local politics in American cities. The challenge that elected officials have is getting their voice heard. Without regular television coverage, and with sporadic or limited print coverage, the Internet has the potential to be a way for the government to reach citizens.

As part of the offering, Knott-Craig and his team devised a platform for elected officials to air their point of view through “over the top” means. Essentially, part of the Wi-Fi service provides access to a public-service “station” filled with information directly from governmental service providers. Because of the nature of the technology, these streams can be cached and provided at an ultra-low cost.

The bottom line for government is that they are in the business of providing basic services for the community. Providing Internet access only adds to the menu of services, including water, electrical, sanitation, police, fire and more. Doing so without a massive new public program of infrastructure is a huge part of what Isizwe did to win over those officials.

Access points

With all the parties enrolled, there still needs to be some technology. It should come as no surprise that setting up access points in townships poses some unique challenges: Physical security, long-haul connectivity and power need to be solved.

One of the neat things about the tech startup ecosystem in South Africa is the ability to draw on resources unique to the country. The buildup of military and security technology, particularly in Pretoria, created an ecosystem of companies and talent well-suited to the task. Given the decline of these industries, it turns out that these resources are now readily available to support new private-sector work.

First up was building out the access points themselves. Unlike a coffee shop, where you would just connect an access point to a cable modem and hide it above a ceiling tile, townships have other challenges. Most of the access points are located high up in secured infrastructure, such as water towers. These locations also have reliable power and are already monitored for security.

The access points are secured in custom-designed enclosures, and use networking equipment sourced from Silicon Valley companies Ruckus Wireless and Ubiquiti Networks, which implement hotspots around the world. This enclosure design and build was done by experienced steel-manufacturing plants in Pretoria. In addition, these enclosures provide two-way security cameras with night vision to monitor things.

This provided for a fun moment the first time someone signed on. A resident had been waiting for the Wi-Fi and was hanging out right below the tower. As soon as they signed on for the first time, back at the operations center they could see this on the dashboard, as well as the camera, and used the two-way loudspeaker to ask, “So how do you like the Wi-Fi?” which was quite a surprise to a guy just checking football scores on his mobile phone.

Along with using engineers from Pretoria to design the enclosure, Isizwe also employed former military engineers to go on-site to install the access points. This work involved two high-risk activities. First, these men needed to climb up some pretty tall structures and install something not previously catered for. Their skills as linemen and soldiers helped here.

More importantly, these were mostly Afrikaner white men venturing into the heart of black townships to do this work. Even though South Africa is years into an integrated and equality-based society, the old emotions are still there, just as has been seen in many other societies.

This would be potentially emotionally charged for these Afrikaners in particular. No only were there no incidents, but the technicians were welcomed with open arms, given the work that they were doing — “We are here to bring you Wi-Fi” — turns out to make it easy to put aside any (wrongly) preconceived notions. In fact, after the job, the installers were quite emotional about how life-changing the experience was for them to go into the townships for the first time and to do good work there.

The absence of underground cabling presents the challenge of getting these access points on the Internet in the first place. To accomplish this, each access point uses a microwave relay to connect back up to a central location, which is then connected over a landline. This is a huge advantage over most Wi-Fi on the African continent, which is generally a high-gain 3G WWAN connection that gets shared over local Wi-Fi.

Bytes flowing

The service is up and running today as a 1.0 version, in which Wi-Fi is free but limited to 250 megabytes; the billing infrastructure is just a few months away, which will enable pay-as-you-go usage of megabytes. The service will be free when there is capacity going unused.

The cost efficacy of the system is incredible, and that is passed along to individual users. Wi-Fi is provided at about 15 cents (ZAR cents) per gigabyte, which compares to more than 80 cents per megabyte for spotty 3G. That is highly affordable for the target customers.

Because of the limits of physics of Wi-Fi, the system is not set up to allow mass streaming of football, which is in high demand. Mechanisms are in place to create what amounts to over-the-top broadcast by using fixed locations within the community.

The most popular services being accessed are short videos on YouTube, music, news, employment information and educational services like Khan Academy and Wikipedia. The generation growing up in the townships is even more committed to education, so it is no surprise to see such a focus. Another important set of services being accessed are those for faith and religion, particularly Christian gospel content.

The numbers are incredible and growing rapidly, as the Isizwe scales to even more townships. In the middle of the afternoon (when people are at school and working), we pulled up the dashboard and saw some stats:

609 people were online right at that moment.

4,455 people had already used the service that day.

304 people had already reached their daily limit that day.

More than 70,000 unique users since the system went online with 1.0 in November 2013.

208GB transferred since going online

Most all of the mobile traffic is Android, along with the newest Asha phones from Nokia. Recycled iPhones from the developed market also make a showing.

In terms of physical infrastructure required, it takes about 200 access points to cover a densely populated area of one million residents. This allows about 200,000 simultaneous users overall, with about 50-500 users per access point, depending on usage and congestion.

Growing

We talk all the time about the transformational nature of mobile connectivity, and many in the U.S. are deeply committed to getting people connected all around the world. Project Isizwe is an incredible example of the local innovation required to build products and services to deliver on those desires.

The public/private/community partnerships that are the hallmark of Isizwe will scale to many townships across South Africa. Building on this base, there are many exciting information-based services that can be provided. Things are just getting started.